Oh, the power of accountability.
Two Bloomfield, New Jersey police officers, Sean Courter and Orlando Trinidad, were found guilty of multiple charges, including falsifying evidence, after dash camera evidence surfaced in a previous trial. According to the AP:
Bloomfield Officers Sean Courter and Orlando Trinidad were found guilty by an Essex County jury of conspiracy, official misconduct, tampering with and falsifying public records and lying to authorities. Courter, 35, and Trinidad, 34, face mandatory minimum prison sentences of five years when they're sentenced in January.
Courter, of Englishtown, and Trinidad, of Bloomfield, initially said motorist Marcus Jeter tried to grab Courter's gun and struck Trinidad during a traffic stop on the Garden State Parkway in 2012. Jeter was charged with resisting arrest, aggravated assault and other offenses based on video from one of the officers' dashboard cameras.
According to the NY Daily News, last year, Jeter, a black man, faced charges of resisting arrest stemming from the 2012 incident. After an incident in which they were called to Jeter's home, Jeter left lawfully but was then pulled over on the Garden State Parkway. According to officers, they and third officer Albert Sutterlin acted reasonably and only began using force after Jeter resisted arrest. The court documents and video from one police car camera used in the proceedings against Jeter seemed to support this account.
Read more below.
However, Jeter's unwavering claim was that he kept his hands up the entire time and feared for his life. While only one police dash camera was used in the charges against Jeter, he was able to obtain a video from the second police car through an open records request. That video showed plainly police crashing into his car, knocking his head into the steering wheel, and brutalizing him. Prosecutors dropped charges against Jeter after the video (below) surfaced. Warning, this video contains scenes of police violence:
Internal police investigations were inclusive (despite access to video from both cars), but all three officers were eventually indicted on charges stemming from the video's release. Mayor Michael Venezia reacted strongly at the time, calling the case a "police cover-up" in a Facebook post. According to NJ.com:
“Like many of you, I am outraged by the police dashboard video and the fact that these charges were initially dismissed by our internal affairs division,” Venezia said in the statement. “I have contacted the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office to request and investigation of our police department’s internal affairs division.
“I will demand the immediate suspension of any officer involved in this police cover-up, and fight to purge our department of any bad officers,” the mayor added.
Officer Sutterlin retired in 2013 after pleading guilty to tampering with evidence and is awaiting sentencing. Officer Trinidad has been cited for several incidents of violence, including a concurrent one in which he
allegedly severed a man's ear. Both Trinidad and Courter face minimum sentences of five years in prison.
This incident shows the power of items and initiatives like dash cameras and body cameras that provide public avenues for police brutality, but only in the hands of prosecutors that choose to do their jobs and actually prosecute cops. It also shows the depths to which ordinary cops can go to cover up incidents of brutality, as well as the completely random and mundane circumstances in which people, especially people of color, are put in danger by police brutality on a daily basis. With his name cleared Jeter is moving forward with a lawsuit in federal court against the township of Bloomfield and ten police officers. Hopefully this case can provide momentum for efforts to end brutality as a regular police practice and hold other police officers accountable as well.
